EmailArchive

Page: Projects.EmailArchive - Last Modified : Sun, 29 Apr 18

Purpose

Over the years I have accumulated multiple gigabytes of email. This is spread over multiple email formats/programs. Some of them even got corrupted by the email program. So although I have all my email, accessing or searching it has proven elusive.

So the idea of having a IMAP server running on a local server where I can move all my mail too and use that as my archiving mechanism. That way it does not depend on the email client I use and should hopefully be a bit more resistant to corruption. But the existing setups to do that is very much DIY.

I started building a Docker container that will do all of this for me. For now it just uses a hard-coded password for all users, but I want to expand it to actually be configurable and be a bit more secure. For now it only runs on the local network and anybody in the family can connect and dump their email there.

Important Links

How to use

There is a script run.sh in the source repo that can be used as an example. The Docker container exports port 143 with a self-signed certificate. The "super" secret password at this time is "secret". It is probably better to pull the Git repository locally, edit dovecot.conf to change the secret and then build your own copy. The important parameters in the run.sh file are:

-p 143:143

--mount source=email-archive,target=/dovecot_mail : This uses a data volume to store the email. This allows you to upgrade without losing your data.